Newspaper, govt. websites knocked offline in major outage

Major Websites around the world were briefly taken offline on Tuesday, apparently due to an outage at a U.S.-based cloud computing provider.

Leading media organisation such as the New York Times, the Financial Times, Bloomberg, the Guardian, BBC, CNN and Le Monde were affected, with users often receiving “Error 503 Service Unavailable’’ messages.

The British government’s main gov.uk website was also knocked offline, as were popular destinations such as Reddit and Etsy.

The outage appeared to be due to a glitch at San Francisco cloud computing company Fastly, which acknowledged around 1000 GMT that it was investigating an issue related to its operations.

Many of the websites were slowly coming back online by 1100 GMT.

In another service update, Fastly said a “a fix is being implemented,’’ but offered no other details. (dpa/NAN)